The battle for the GOP’s heart and soul

The voice of the people who are the base of today’s Republican Party has come through loud and clear: “Please lie to me!”

And the candidates have heard and heeded their clarion call.

So far, the most successful Republican candidates in the 2016 presidential campaign— including the front-runner in all the polls, Donald Trump— have been those who have been most skillful at exploiting the people’s frustrations by telling the people whatever they want to hear. Candidate debates have been replete with promissory pandering redundancies: promises of pain-free fixes to end deficit spending without ending government programs their supporters like, win our wars on terror without putting American boots on any battleground, make immigration problems vanish by just building a great wall and somehow finding a cost-free way to round up and deport 11 million illegal immigrants.

After the Islamic State terrorist attacks in Paris, Republican presidential hopefuls who often invoke the U.S. Constitution in debates, embraced ideas that would deep-six the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of religion by adopting a policy that would permit entry into the U.S. of Arab refugees who are Christians, but exclude Muslims.

But in recent days, the contest to capture the heart and soul of the real base of today’s Republican Party took a new turn that was both clarifying and very unsettling to many of the Grand Old Party’s establishment figures and ordinary longtime loyal voters.

It occurred when Trump chose to expand his declarations about why Americans must be wary of Muslim Americans. Trump claimed that on Sept. 11, 2001, he had seen on television that “thousands and thousands” of Muslims had been cheering and celebrating the collapse of the twin towers. And when confronted by fact-checking journalists who said they’d never found any visual evidence that this occurred, Trump vehemently and repeatedly insisted he had seen it with his own eyes.

Trump’s own researchers came up with one newspaper article, written in The Washington Post by a respected reporter, Serge Kovaleski, reporting that authorities had questioned some persons who had reportedly been seen celebrating after the 9/11 attacks— but the story never mentioned “thousands” and no one has ever shown any photograph or video of such an occurrence.

During a rally, Trump responded to the challengers by attacking Kovaleski, who is now a New York Times reporter, by launching into the crudest, cruelest outrage ever exhibited by any major party candidate for president. Kovaleski, who says he had previously conducted maybe a dozen one-on-one interviews with Trump, suffers from a joint affliction that limits his use of his arms. Shamefully, Trump chose to attack the journalist’s reporting by ridiculing his affliction.

“You’ve got see this guy,” Trump told his audience while seemingly mimicking the journalist’s handicap by bringing his arms up to his chest with wrists bent and hands dangling helplessly. Trump began twitching spastically and also began talking in what sounded like a twisted comic’s mimicking of a handicapped voice:

“‘Ah, I don’t know what I said. Ah, I don’t remember!’ He’s going, ‘I don’t remember. Maybe that’s what I said!’”

In the days that followed, many noted commentators opined on the offensive nature of Trump’s sick act—and about the candidate himself. But of all the observations I read, one stands out as being most on point. It was written not by a journalist, but in an email sent to me by a friend, Francesca Yabraian, a career government professional who has lived with two disabilities—she has epilepsy and dyslexia, which led to her enduring a childhood in which she was at times taunted and bullied by thoughtless children, just as Trump taunted a journalist who offended him by reporting what he had and had not found.

“He is a soulless man,” Yabraian wrote.

A soulless man. That is the essence of Trump. He prides himself on leveling attacks on each of his opponents—just as he did when he mounted his birther campaign of attacks against President Barack Obama’s right to be president.

A soulless man. That not only sums up all that is so objectionable about Trump, but it also gets to the larger point that must concern all Republicans at all levels: If a soulless man can capture the heart and soul of the Republican Party, what does that tell Republicans about themselves? Has their onceGrand Old Party lost its soul?